


Vitae Lampada

by tree_and_leaf



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen, Literary Reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-25
Updated: 2010-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-06 16:32:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tree_and_leaf/pseuds/tree_and_leaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her pupils would never have guessed it, but Minerva McGonagall was passionately fond of poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vitae Lampada

**Author's Note:**

> I am neither JK Rowling nor any of the poets I have quoted. I'm not Thomas Cranmer, either. If you can recognise it, it's not mine.

Her pupils would certainly never have guessed it, but Minerva McGonagall was passionately fond of poetry.

It had, of course, begun in childhood, encouraged and indulged by an otherwise stern father, a pillar of the magical establishment in Dundee, and despite the disgust of her late mother's brother, Uncle Pollux, who muttered about her father's disgraceful Squib Uncle Topaz, who even the Muggles had laughed at. Minerva paid him no mind. She had read some of her great-uncle's efforts, and it didn't take much to see that their problem was a complete lack of awareness, both of the world at large as it really was, and of the way language sounded. She didn't have that problem. The words rolled off her tongue, the precise value tasted and savoured, the precisely right image gazed upon.

_Tiger, tiger, burning bright…_

Quinquerime of Nineveh from distant Ophir

"After all, Pollux," her father said, ending the argument, "You must admit that there's an awful lot in knowing how to control sound and vision in spell-making."

She didn't like poetry because of that, though. She liked it because it showed her other world, other visions, a wider universe.

_Much have I travelled in the realms of gold_

And she liked it because of the noise it made.

The only poem her father taught her, oddly, was about a Muggle game called cricket.

_A bumping pitch and a blinding light,  
Ten to make and the match to win_

He took her to watch it, once, at Perth: young men in white flannels playing solemnly on the Inch by the river, apparently not much disturbed by the fact that the crowd consisted of three men, a little girl, and a dog. It wasn't bad, she supposed, but not a patch on Quidditch. But her father pointed out how they cared about doing their best: they wanted to win, yes, but fairly, by playing the game as it should be played. They didn't cheat, and they respected their opponents. "Not for the sake of a ribboned coat, or the selfish hope of a season's fame" her father quoted. "You play for your team, and for your house – but you play for the sake of the game, too. You can't win by cheating, you can only make people think you have. But it'll never feel right. Remember that, Minnie."

The poem wasn't about cricket, really, but though her father had known that well enough, she didn't realise it until much later. Sometimes she made her pupils learn it, if she caught them cheating at Quidditch, but she wasn't sure how much good it did them. Poetry was a bit of a minority interest at Hogwarts, even in her day.

But she still loved it. New poets came over the years. Yeats, who her father wouldn't have in the house because he was a Godless pagan and a rebel (and, she admitted, what she'd read about his attempts in 'magic' were too silly for words – but that didn't spoil "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" or "I will arise now and go to Innisfree", or even "Leda and the Swan", though she wasn't sure she _liked_ that one, exactly.) Auden, later, and Eliot eventually, though only after the _Four Quartets_. And travelling backwards in time, to Donne, and Marvell, and even further, to the Kingis Quair.

_The woods decay, the woods decay and fall_

Time passed, and the normal business of life went on. Study, and then teaching, the daily round, the common task: homework, and rotas, and tea with friends and holidays in France or Italy and trips to hear lectures at the Scholomance or in Wittenberg. There had been a few men, but none she'd really loved. The Quidditch season, the House Cup. Occasional attempts to take up gardening, defeated by lack of time and, though she'd have died rather than admit it, patience. Two wars and another one coming.

And at the back of it all, the quiet pulsing in the mind of the words she'd read, marked and inwardly digested.

_Proud Masie's in the wood, singing so early_

Sometimes she quoted them, almost without noticing. She found it happening more as she got older, though she hadn't done it in class, yet. Snape had always snorted impatiently, but Albus smiled at it, except once, in the last year of his life, the last year of the cold peace, or was it the first year of the war, when they had been having tea together and she had found herself, unbidden, quoting an old Border Ballad:

_I saw a dead man win a fight,  
And I dreamed that man was I_

And Albus had sighed and said nothing, but she looked over at him and saw, to her dismay, that he looked suddenly ancient and spent. It was almost enough to make one believe in divination…

It was strange, or perhaps not so strange, that it was things she had learned in the school room that lingered, even though, in some cases, they weren't very good poems. At some of the darkest moments, she found herself repeating, almost like a prayer "But not through eastern windows only…"

But on the very last day of the war, when the battle came to Hogwarts itself, she found herself confronting Voldemort's army on, of all places the Quidditch pitch, watching as Harry, old beyond his years, rallied them for battle.

"And the voice of a schoolboy steadies the ranks:  
Play up, play up, and play the game" she murmured, and drew her wand for the battle she had been preparing for all her life.


End file.
